Latest news with #psychodrama
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
An astonishing new approach to ‘Frankenstein'
The 'Frankenstein' that roared to life in D.C. this past weekend marks a triumphant U.S. directorial debut for London-based theater savant Emily Burns, who'd already earned a measure of local attention for adapting the script for the 'Macbeth' that brought Ralph Fiennes to Shakespeare Theatre Company last spring. As in that intriguing but uneven exercise, Burns has chucked a night-dark classic and a brisk contemporary vibe into her authorial Cuisinart. But this time, with the writer-director not just remixing the story but shepherding the whole shebang, the resulting world premiere is a blistering success — unabashedly intelligent, sumptuously visualized, taut as an assassin's garrote. It's jump-scary psychodrama with a literary pedigree, served up in sleek prestige-TV style. If there's any theatrical justice it'll end up making piles of money on Broadway and the West End. We're still in Geneva circa 1790, still in Mary Shelley's shadow-shrouded tale of an Enlightenment-inspired wannabe scientist. The moral and ethical probings still circle around what exactly Victor Frankenstein (Nick Westrate) has been up to of late. But there's also the intimately personal question, more urgent now than ever, of what the fallout will be for Elizabeth (Rebecca S'manga Frank), Victor's adopted sister and eventual wife. You might reasonably guess that in a rewrite grounded in what the script says is 'psychologically now,' she'll end up being far more than a tragic second-banana figure. What you might not expect is how far and how firmly Burns will manage to shift focus to Elizabeth without entirely dismissing Victor as 'the real monster,' that tired old oversimplification. Or how much genuinely suffocating suspense she'll wring from the hows and the whys and the what-could-you-possibly-be-thinkings. We'll have none of the novel's epistolary, travelogue-y throat-clearings to kick off this brutally efficient retelling; no Arctic vistas, no random ice floe encounters. Burns launches things in smothering gloom instead, with moody surtitles and a moodier voice-over. (Tired devices, you might sneer, right up until they pay off in a hair-raising collision of remembered horror, real-time revelation and rapacious need.) Those opening atmospherics give way, suddenly and startlingly, to a titanic thunderclap and a strobed glimpse of what looks for an instant like your standard mad-scientist lab setup. (The design elements, courtesy of scenarist Andrew Boyce, costumer Kaye Voyce, lighting guru Neil Austin, sound artist André Pluess and projectionist Elizabeth Barrett, prove uniformly superb and enviably unified.) A quick tonal shift, more light, and we're in the soaring moonlit kitchen of the Frankenstein family's stately home, well past midnight on the stormy eve of the young couple's long-planned wedding. Then Burns's lean story edit derails not just the planned nuptials but everyone's entire lives: Victor's 10-year-old brother, William, reported missing in the opening exchanges, is confirmed dead. Which is when things get all 21st-century head-shrinky: Justine (Anna Takayo), the devoted family retainer framed for the murder in Shelley's version, implicates her own self in this telling, confessing to the crime out of a morbid conviction that her impatience with William's preadolescent rowdiness had driven him out of the house and into the real killer's path. And Justine's piercing need to atone for what she sees as unforgivably bad (surrogate) parenting is merely the first suggestion of the soul-searchings to come over at the Frankenstein place. Victor and Elizabeth and eventually their righteous wet nurse (Takayo again, chameleoning nicely) will dig into memories of childhood alienation, tales of shifting parental affections and confrontations around what being a decent mother even means. Or, crucially, a halfway-decent father. It's all grounded impeccably, both in key themes from the original text and in stark traumas Shelley navigated in real life: Her mother's death was a direct result of her birth, while her own son, not coincidentally named William, was ailing around the time of the novel's conception and dead by the age of 3. The author lost three other children in their infancy, too. No shortage of resonance in all that for this adaptation's explorations of what courage it takes to contemplate the making of a child, how hugely the process of creating life can go awry, how quickly the simplicities of youth can curdle into the monstrosities of adult humanity. Frank's hypnotically sure performance as Elizabeth is the staging's bright lodestar. Her voice is caramel and cloves, expressive even in Burns's lighter modern phrasings, downright beguiling in more lyrical passages taken whole from Shelley's period text. Her body language speaks more resonantly yet: Stillness can equal immense authority onstage, and this actor's economy of movement generates black hole gravity, making larger gestures all the more seismic when they erupt. Takayo's is a nervier and more restless presence, as is Westrate's — aptly enough given the essential fecklessness of this adaptation's still-charming Victor. He's twitchy and shifty and impossible to repose any real faith in, this thoroughly modern man-child, which is one potent way Burns sustains the evening's exquisite narrative tension. Grounding a character's evasions and fictions in a physical vocabulary that screams 'I cannot be trusted' is a sly tactic for making an audience second-guess what it already knows to be a horrifying truth. That truth, of course, involves what constitutes monstrosity, and in whose eyes. Burns's last great coup is the climactic reveal that finally settles the question of whether this tale of a grotesque and murderous villain bears any resemblance to fact. It's not quite a spoiler to acknowledge that a Creature does make an appearance — actor Lucas Iverson gets a playbill credit, after all — but the specifics of that answer and the delicacy in how Burns and company navigate the moment elicited audible gasps at Sunday's matinee. Like nearly every rich and gorgeous element of this 'Frankenstein,' it's flat-out astonishing. Frankenstein, through June 29 at the Klein Theatre. About 2 hours 20 minutes, including an intermission.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
I'm an Afrikaner. Trump's resettled South Africans don't represent me.
I'm a South African writer and translator based in Cape Town. I am 42, White and an Afrikaner. As the United States has turned its attention to my country, it has revealed an old, ugly truth: The only thing most Americans know or want to know about South Africa is how it can be turned into fodder for your nation's psychodramas.
News.com.au
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Jennifer Lawrence: ‘Motherhood can make you feel like an alien'
In Lynne Ramsay's psychodrama Die, My Love, Lawrence plays Grace, who left alone to look after her newborn in a rundown house in remote Montana while her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) goes off to work. Speaking at a press conference promoting the movie at the Cannes Film Festival, Lawrence said she empathised with her character as she had recently become a mother and was expecting her second when filming last year. "As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do."
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Extreme anxiety and extreme depression': Jennifer Lawrence says she felt ‘like an alien' as a new mother
Jennifer Lawrence has spoken of the 'extremely isolating' effect of the postpartum period, while discussing a new film in which she portrays a mother descending into psychosis. In Scottish art-house director Lynne Ramsay's moody psychodrama Die, My Love, Lawrence's character Grace is left alone to look after her newborn in a ramshackle house in the remote woods of Montana while her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) goes off to work. 'As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do,' Lawrence said in a press conference on the eve of the film's premiere at the Cannes film festival. 'And it was just heartbreaking.' The Hunger Games star, who gave birth to her first child in 2022 and was five months pregnant with her second when filming began on Die, My Love in 2024, said 'there's not really anything like postpartum … it's extremely isolating. The truth is extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.' Die, My Love is based on Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz's novel of the same name. It is Ramsay's second film to explore the darker sides of motherhood, after her critically acclaimed 2011 feature We Need to Talk about Kevin, based on Lionel Shriver's novel. Batman star Pattinson, who became a father in 2024, said he was usually drawn to more abrasive characters than Jackson, but that the character's struggles while coping with a partner's mental health issues resonated with him. 'Especially in postpartum, trying to deal with her isolation and trying to figure out your heart and your role in the relationship, it's incredibly difficult, especially if you don't have the vernacular,' Pattinson said in Cannes. 'He's not a mental health professional. He's just hoping that the relationship will go back to what it was.' Contrary to the swirling horror of early motherhood portrayed in the film, Lawrence insisted having children had made her a better actor. 'I didn't know that I could feel so much,' she said. 'My job has a lot to do with emotion … and they've changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.' In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978
Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Surfer review — Nicolas Cage saves this pretentious thriller
Nicolas Cage's trademark Gonzo energy is the vital spark in this dense thriller, rescuing the film from its own pretensions. It's a bonkers sun-scorched psychodrama about a middle-aged beta-male divorcee trapped in a car park from hell, metres away from a paradise beach in southwest Australia. Cage's character, known only as 'the Surfer', has come to Luna Bay (actual location: Yallingup Beach) to bond with his semi-estranged son, seal a nearby property deal and reinvigorate his hollow, lonely dad existence. Unfortunately a group of local 'surf gangsters' — called the Bay Boys and led by the charismatic Scally (Nip/Tuck's Julian McMahon) — have other ideas. They ban the surfer from the beach, steal his shoes and phone, and confine him to the car
